"Teasing Secrets from the Dead: My Investigations at America's Most Infamous Crime Scenes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Craig Emily)

4. Crying Out for Justice

THE BLACK BLOWFLIES were so heavy and slow in the summer air that I could knock them to the ground with my bare hand. The two dead bodies over which they swarmed already seethed with maggots, offspring of the flies that had gotten there several days before me. As I knelt beside the woman's body, sweat running from my forehead and puddling inside my oversized glasses, I felt as though someone had draped my shoulders with a hot, wet blanket.

The bodies lay only a few yards apart, so just by pacing back and forth through the weeds I could see that each of them was at the same stage of decay. They had both been killed at about the same time-not too long ago, judging by the faintly lighter green of the grass peeking out from underneath their bodies. If they'd been here more than a few days, the grass would have yellowed; if they'd been here longer than that, it would have died completely.

I was also fairly certain that someone had tossed these bodies here when they were already dead. Their arms and legs were in awkward disarray, and no nearby plants had been disrupted-no broken stems or wilted stalks to indicate a struggle. The lack of pooled or spattered blood on the grass also told me that the bodies had been put here after death, when blood remains within the body because there is no beating heart to force it out.

These two had not died gently. Their skulls had actually warped from the attacks they had sustained-a common occurrence with low-velocity blunt-force trauma, which can cause bone to literally bend before it breaks, never to return to its original shape. Only the murderer knew just how much force it had taken to do that, and to split the skulls into the pieces I saw here, but at least I could read part of these victims' story in the large gaps of missing bone and in the fracture lines that crisscrossed their caved-in skulls. I knew, too, that as they lay there, with their broken and bloody skulls, flies had chosen those warm, moist areas to lay their first eggs, and I could see their hatching larvae concentrated there now, busily consuming everything except hair, bones, and teeth.

A little more than a year had passed since I'd been at Waco, and this was the first case for which I was completely on my own. Just three working days ago, on July 1, I'd signed on as State Forensic Anthropologist, making me responsible for the analysis and identification of decomposed bodies and skeletal remains found anywhere in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. But even if I'd already worked a thousand cases, this would have been a tough one.

It started when a farmer had discovered the bodies of this woman and child in the tall grass at the edge of a fallow pasture somewhere near the close-knit town of Somerset, in Pulaski County. By the time I got to the scene, the sheriff's deputies had already identified the victims as a twenty-one-year-old woman and her four-year-old half-brother, last seen sitting on the steps of a neighborhood church on the afternoon of Sunday, just four days before. Obviously, they hadn't been murdered on the church steps-but where had they died? And when, and how? Obviously, the murderer had fractured their skulls-but had he shot them first? Beaten them to death? Or perhaps they had died by stabbing or even strangulation, the final beating merely an angry aftermath? If I could help investigators answer these questions, we might be able to answer the biggest question of all: Who killed them?

Coroner Alan Stringer had called me right after noon, asking me to come down to help with the crime scene investigation. Three days into the job, and I couldn't have found Somerset on a map-luckily, I was able to catch a ride with a couple of state police lab techs also assigned to the case. I didn't know any of the investigators yet, either, who were now standing behind me in a loose semicircle, safely away from the overwhelming smell. Sheriff Sam Catron stepped up and introduced himself, gallantly volunteering to assist with what he knew was going to be a difficult job. The good-natured mix of uniformed deputies and detectives in street clothes backed off just far enough to where they could watch my every move and see how I was going to work beside their fearless leader. I brushed ineffectually at the swarm of flies now buzzing around my head and wondered if the overwhelming smell would make me faint. It was time to collect samples of my old nemesis: maggots.

I started with the woman, whose skull bones peeped out from under a mass of dark, wet, maggot-filled hair. Normally, I'd gather maggots with a small spoon-like scoop, but I was so new to the job that I hadn't yet gotten my crime scene kit in order. Stifling a grimace, I reached into the maggot mass with my latex-gloved hand and pulled up a handful. As they writhed in my palm, I used my other hand to pick out a dozen long, plump ones and drop them into a little plastic cup, the kind doctors use to collect urine samples. My goal was to “freeze them in time”-to kill them while leaving their bodies intact-so that an entomologist could tell us just how old they were.

At school I'd killed maggots by filling my specimen jar with 70 percent isopropyl alcohol, but that was yet another item that was missing from my crime scene kit. Maybe if I covered them with scalding water?

“Okay, but where in the world am I going to find boiling hot water, way out here…?” I had been literally thinking out loud during this whole process, talking through each one of my actions for the benefit of my colleagues. This was a technique I'd developed during my Tennessee casework, when I'd realized that, otherwise, my actions seemed meaningless at best, downright weird at worst. Besides, sharing my process gave others a chance to offer a helping hand.

Sure enough, one of the detectives called out, “What about the radiator in your van? Y'all just drove a hundred miles. It should still be plenty hot.”

“What a brilliant idea!” I cocked my head at my fellow investigators, held out my cup of maggots, and smiled sweetly. “Can one of you please take care of this for me?”

I sat back on my heels and waited as the investigators shuffled their feet and looked sideways at each other. Finally, Deputy Coroner Tim Phelps sidled over and tentatively took the cup. He headed back to the van and I went back to picking maggots off the woman's body. From somewhere behind me, I heard the sound of a hood popping open and then Tim's agonized groan of disgust as he siphoned scalding water from the radiator over the writhing insects. I tried to hide my smirk.

Much to Tim's dismay, I wasn't finished. He watched me extract samples from the maggot mass churning in the woman's pubic area, then bravely made a second trip back to the van. I moved on to collect still more samples from the little boy, labeling each cup with the place on the body from which they'd been taken, along with the date, time, case number, and my initials.

To Tim's-and my-enormous relief, the maggot-collection part of my work was soon finished. Now it was time to take the temperature of the maggot mass itself, a task requiring the coroner's extra-long thermometer, the one he used to stick in the liver or rectum of recently dead bodies to find out how much they'd cooled off. If you slid the thermometer into the various maggot masses in the woman's and boy's bodies, you could document more information that might help determine time of death.

Next it was time to document the temperature and humidity of the air that enveloped the bodies-the same hot, sticky air that was making it so hard for me to breathe. The entomologist would eventually need this climatological data, so today and every day for a week the coroner or a deputy would have to return to this spot and document the temperature and humidity. The entomologist would then be able to look at the data and the maggots and work backward to figure out when the flies had first laid their eggs, when the maggots started feasting on the dead bodies-and when the bodies might have shown up in the field.

I went on to document the bodies' location, taking photos and making a quick sketch to remind me of their relationship to the surrounding scene. The sheriff's deputies were experts in this sort of procedure, so I left them to their more detailed sketches while I studied the two victims once more. Their postcranial area-everything from the neck on down-was still intact, which meant that any clues in these areas were the province of the forensic pathologist. Although there are some areas of overlap, pathologists usually deal with the soft tissues, while I deal with the hard ones-bones and teeth. If enough of the body is intact to permit a traditional autopsy, the pathologist conducts it, documenting the general appearance of the person and the internal organs, and collecting blood and tissue samples for analysis. If not enough soft tissue remains to yield any clues, then we rely on the bones, which I usually work on by myself. This division of labor-soft versus hard tissue-can be confusing to crime-show fans, since TV pathologists tend to appear as experts in all things; but in the forensic world, a person has usually either studied soft tissue and gotten an M.D. or has studied hard tissue and gotten an M.A. or a Ph.D. in anthropology. After all, no one can specialize in everything.

“Go ahead and bag them,” I told the coroner now, knowing that his men would take the bodies to the morgue. Tomorrow the forensic pathologist and I would do an autopsy together-him focusing on the soft tissue, me concentrating on the bone.

The coroner and his deputy wrapped each body in a clean white sheet and placed it in an individual body bag. Until we got a positive ID, the bags were labeled John and Jane Doe.

As the coroner was zipping up the first bag, I moved to the soil where the little boy's head had lain. Luckily, I'd brought a hand trowel, which I now dragged across the soil and matted grass. Piece by piece, a little treasure trove emerged: brownish-gray fragments from his shattered skull, tiny teeth that had separated from the rest of his head during decomp, and small black tufts of hair that had fallen away as his scalp sloughed off. Sealing my collection in a small plastic bag, I quickly labeled it “from head area of child victim” and tucked it inside the boy's body bag. As the guys carried the bag to the coroner's van, I made a similar collection in the spot where the woman had decomposed.

The police and sheriff's men had finished documenting the scene and were now fanning out across the surrounding field, searching for any remaining evidence. I'd finished my work though, so I stripped off my gloves, tore open a package of disinfecting towelettes to wipe my dripping face and hands, and plumped myself down on a clean patch of grass to drink a bottle of cold spring water.

“Well, I'm sorry we had to meet under these circumstances, but I'm sure glad you came down here.” Alan, the coroner, was sitting down beside me.

“Hey, a double homicide after three days on the job-I feel like I've just jumped into the deep end of the pool.”

Alan laughed quietly and handed me a clipboard full of forms.

“You know, Alan,” I said quickly, “this is my first case here in Kentucky. Think you could help me out with the paperwork?”

He grinned. “Don't worry, Doc, we got you covered.” He began to leaf through the pages with me. We continued to talk about the case until Alan asked finally, “So you and Dr. Hunsaker will do the autopsy tomorrow?”

I nodded. “Yes, he and I had better work on this one side by side-if that's okay with you.”

This was all old hat to Alan, but I was still getting used to the Kentucky procedure. Because Kentucky is such a large and rural state, every county has its own elected coroner, who serves as the primary death scene investigator after receiving special training in forensic death investigations. Elected coroners are not usually M.D.s, and even if they are, they don't do the autopsies. Instead, the coroner normally works the crime scene, sending any bodies that need autopsies to one of four regional state medical examiner's offices, where forensic pathologists who are M.D.s analyze the body further. The coroner has ultimate responsibility for his or her county, however, authorizing the pathologist to do the autopsy, receiving the final report and, ultimately, issuing the death certificate.

Sometimes the coroner also needs a bone specialist, in which case he or she calls me. I might come out to the crime scene, assist at the autopsy, or take the bones back to my lab in Frankfort. In this case, pathologist Dr. John Hunsaker would be analyzing the bodies' soft tissue while I tried to figure out what had happened to their skulls.

“Any thoughts so far?” Alan asked.

“Well, it's obvious their skulls were shattered,” I said slowly. “But right now I can't tell just how. And I strongly suspect they were dumped here, not killed here.” I was also fairly certain that the victims had died by blunt-force trauma-from being beaten, not shot or stabbed-but I wouldn't really know for sure until I'd had a chance to go back to my laboratory and rebuild the skulls. Since bones break in a fairly predictable manner, rebuilt skulls-or even skull fragments-can often help us figure out what caused the damage. At the very least, we might be able to rule out some potential weapons. Bullet wounds are pretty distinctive, but blunt-force trauma can also leave clues. The round end of a ball-peen hammer, for instance, often leaves a ball-shaped indentation, while a tire iron or the shaft of a golf club tends to leave a long narrow groove.

To get a true picture, though, you need to recover as many skull fragments as you can. Although in this case I'd found lots of loose skull pieces on the ground, I could see that several more fragments were still embedded in the congealed blood and decomposing brain tissue packed within the “brain case,” the cranium. John and I would have to work out a carefully choreographed sequence in tomorrow's autopsy to make sure that neither of us damaged the other's evidence.

For both of us, the maggots were going to be both help and hindrance: a help because they'd enable us to narrow down the postmortem interval, or “time since death”; a hindrance because as long as there were maggots in the body, they'd continue to devour its flesh even if the coroner put the bodies in the morgue cooler.

A maggot mass can take on an astonishing life of its own once it gets established in a carcass. Thousands of maggots can accumulate in a dead victim's chest cavity or pelvis, sort of like a chicken carcass packed tight with lots of creamy overcooked rice. Then the maggots pull together into a cohesive group that churns and boils continually when the air temperature gets too cold for them, as individual maggots try desperately to reach the core for warmth, pushing their hapless neighbors to the periphery-only to be themselves pushed out of the way by yet more desperate maggots. At night or in the morgue cooler, the collective maggot metabolism can be as much as 10 degrees higher than the rest of the body's temperature, so when the body emerges from the fridge, you're likely to see a cloud of steam rising slowly from your homicide victim's collapsed and half-devoured chest.

“Put the bodies in the freezer, not the cooler,” I told the men. Most maggots can survive those sub-zero temperatures, but at least the freezer's extreme cold would arrest their appetites and make them sluggish. Let's take every opportunity we humans have-the maggots will get their turn soon enough.

The next day at autopsy, the victims' chest cavities were indeed packed tightly with maggots. For now, they were immobilized-stunned from the cold-but in less than an hour, they'd start to move again. John and I would have to hurry.

I was dressed in the usual blue-green scrubs, surgical gown, gloves, mask, and face shield. My gear protects me from everything but the smell, which always seems to soak right into my skin, my hair, my nose, even my taste buds. Menthol cream smeared under my nose doesn't seem to help, either-it just adds more noxious fumes to the mix. When I first started in this line of work, I thought someday I'd get used to it-but I haven't.

This would be a conventional autopsy, so I was only responsible for the teeth and skull bones. I'm always grateful for the “learning by touch” that Tyler and I had practiced in osteology class, given how many times I have to resort to compressing soft tissues manually in order to retrieve bone and teeth fragments, much as I'd done with the children at Waco. Skull fragments and teeth often filter down into the base of the skull, the neck, or even the victim's decomposing chest cavity, and then I have to grope around to find them, feeling through dark brownish-green tissues that resemble nothing so much as chocolate pudding into which someone has stirred a few cups of chunky vomit.

Meanwhile, the body is still home to tens of thousands of maggots, boiling up out of the chest cavity like suds overflowing from a washing machine. Someone once naïvely asked me why I couldn't simply remove the maggots before doing an autopsy, and all I could do was shake my head and chuckle. By the time we got rid of the maggots, there'd be nothing left of the body.

Still, the notion of fumigating a maggot-filled body is an appealing fantasy, because after my hands have been dipped in this cauldron of gore for a few minutes, the maggots start to climb up my sleeve, coated with a sticky mucus that allows them to cling to a number of different surfaces. Over my gloves and arms they crawl, migrating up toward my face, with its tempting facial openings… I am so repulsed by their slow, determined journey that my reflexes often take over, causing me to flick my wrist and send several maggots hurling to the floor. That seems like a good place for them-until they start to wriggle off under the counters or climb up the leg of another lab worker or an unsuspecting med student who's come along to observe. So once those maggots hit the floor, you've simply got to step on them-even though stepping on an engorged adult maggot is like smashing a miniature grape. They pop-and their pus-colored innards smear over the floor, making yet another mess. To me there's no contest, though: better underfoot than on my face.

Over the years, I've developed a number of little tricks to cope with my maggot friends. I've learned to work quickly and to keep the autopsy room as cold as possible. That at least renders the maggots a little sluggish, giving us humans a slight but crucial advantage. Even more than the cold, maggots hate bright light, so whenever possible, I put a large black trash bag over a central portion of the body. After a while the maggots migrate underneath. Slowly I slip the bag down to the other end of the gurney, with many maggots following desperately along, leaving me to work in relative peace. It's nice to feel smarter than a maggot.

“Well, Emily, you're certainly starting off with a bang,” John commented as we began today's autopsy. He looked like your stereotypical college professor-kind of handsome in a studious sort of way, tall and a bit stooped, with his glasses perpetually dangling from a cord around his neck. He always wore a soft brown Mr. Rogers sweater to ward off the chill in the morgue, and he puffed continually on a large wooden pipe to help kill the smell.

“I know,” I said as he cut into the body and flipped a few maggots of his own onto the floor. “A double murder. Not bad for three days on the job.”

“Don't forget to find some tenants for your ‘maggot motel,'” he said with a grin. I knew he understood the science behind it, but I defy anyone to say “maggot motel” with a straight face. Since many maggot species look similar, the entomologist needs to see the adult flies, and so it was my lucky job to collect another dozen larvae from the body and raise them to adulthood. Although all of the pathologists know how to do this, they're even more squeamish than I am when it comes to maggots, so if I'm around, my colleagues are more than willing to pass this duty on to me whether or not it's a skeletal case. I use a simple milk carton with some dirt on the bottom and a small chunk of chicken liver wrapped loosely in aluminum foil. The maggots gorge themselves on the liver, then bury themselves in the dirt to pupate. One of the weirdest parts of my job is my nightly bed-check at the maggot motel, making sure my little charges are alive and well and have plenty to eat.

“I'll never get used to those things,” I said now. “Hey, John, do me a favor, will you? Take a few more puffs of your pipe.” The secondhand smoke covered the smell for me, too.

After John and I had finished the autopsy, I cleaned the skulls and skull fragments, submerging them into warm soapy water and scrubbing them clean with a toothbrush, just as I'd done at Waco. I left them to dry overnight and returned the next day to begin the laborious process of gluing the skulls back together.

In this case, all my questions centered on the skulls, but later I'd run into cases where I had to clean and examine every single bone in a body, searching for skeletal trauma or maybe evidence of an old injury to help me make an ID. This doesn't happen very often, maybe one case in five, but when it does, it's a real chore-messy, time-consuming, and smelly. It's something like deboning a rotten chicken though, of course, on a much larger scale. I use x-rays and photographs to help me figure out some way of working the bones free from the decomposing flesh without damaging them. After all, some of the bones might hold tiny cut marks or other evidence of a murderer's actions, and I don't want to leave my own trace evidence alongside of his.

If there's not too much flesh, I can usually pull the bones out of the soft tissue with a very tiny tweak, like twisting a stem off an apple. If I meet even the slightest resistance, though, I'll dissect the bones away with a small pair of blunt-tip, curve-bladed scissors. Again, my main concern is not to nick or cut any of the cartilage or bone. As I remove each bone from its fleshy casing, I place it on another gurney, aligning my collection in anatomical order. That way, I can do a skeletal inventory while I work, noting what's missing and checking each bone as I lay it into place-my first chance to look for breaks, bruises, or other anomalies that might offer us clues.

If the bones are still too fleshy to reveal their secrets, I'll take them to the corner of my lab that my colleagues jokingly call “Miss Em's kitchen.” There I boil the bones gently, cooking off any remaining flesh in a process we call “thermal maceration.”

Like any good cook, I have my system. I fill two Crock-Pots and a large covered roasting pan with water and some mild dish-washing detergent, which helps cut the grease. I like to have my pots full and ready to go before I even start recovering the bones, so I can drop everything into the water and turn on all the devices at the same time. That way, I know exactly how long each bone has cooked, and I can be certain nothing cooks too long. I make sure that the water heats up gradually, too, so that each bone can adjust to the heat.

I'm happy to report that thermal maceration will destroy even the most tenacious of maggots, including those which hide themselves deep within a bone's nerve and artery channels. If I'm in a particularly sadistic mood, I'll watch as the water heats up and the maggots swarm frantically out of their hiding places. They rise to the top of the steaming liquid, writhing momentarily on the greasy film that forms on the surface before they succumb to the heat. Occasionally some of the more athletic maggots even manage to scale the Crock-Pot's ceramic liner-only to sizzle and pop when they slide down the other side and land on the cooker's hot metal frame.

I hadn't had to boil any bones, but it had taken me several hours to reconstruct the skulls, working by myself and using simple household glue out of a tube. As I stood by my shiny morgue table, watching them dry-the large skull for the woman, the little one for the child-I felt a bitter satisfaction. My colleagues and I had collected a huge amount of evidence that might someday be used to convict a killer. Of course, I'm a scientist, and my focus is on the evidence, not the criminal or the crime. And even as I write this, no suspects for this killing have been arrested. Still, I had my own reward: the contentment of having done the best I could, of making the evidence reveal its secrets so that justice-whatever it was-could be done. I can't reveal any more about this open case, but suffice it to say that there is no statute of limitations on murder, and tomorrow always brings another day and another chance.

Tomorrow also seems always to bring another case. In my first six months on the job, I had to deal with the exhumation of an allegedly battered child who had been buried in 1972; a partially skeletonized victim tied to a tree and shot in the head; a corpse hidden in a refrigerator for a year; a decomposed body found in the Cumberland River; one case of skeletal remains slashed by a farm implement; another battered and left along the side of the road; and a third left scattered in the woods. Before the end of 1994, I also had to deal with eight separate cases in which fire had reduced the bodies to bone. Seven of these were probably tragic accidents, but one was definitely a homicide disguised by fire. Three mountain men blown to bits by land mines in a booby-trapped marijuana patch rounded out the census for that first half year.

With this kind of caseload, it didn't take me long to understand why Kentucky needed a full-time forensic anthropologist. Kentucky has a history of violent crime and “mountain justice” dating back even before the notorious feuds of the Hatfields and the McCoys. This culture of lawlessness has only gotten worse with the rise of illegal drug use and marijuana's dubious honor as the one of the Commonwealth's most lucrative cash crops. Add to that the region's large areas with limited access-perfect for hiding dead bodies-and a warm climate that needs only days to reduce a body to bones, and you have the ideal conditions to produce lots and lots of skeletal remains.

Sometimes the bones I look at are not recent victims but rather are ancient or historic bones that turn up during construction projects or archaeological digs. I try to refer those cases to one of Kentucky 's many expert archaeologists or physical anthropologists, people whose academic training suits them to that type of analysis. I stick to bones that tell the stories of more recent crimes, though I occasionally consult with the academics to take advantage of their expertise.

One such expert is Nancy Ross-Stallings, a bespectacled self-avowed science nerd who works out of the tiny community of Harrodsburg as a contract archaeologist. She first came to my aid in the winter of 1995, after I had spent two days in the woods of McCreary County, down in the Daniel Boone National Forest near the Tennessee line.

Bill Conley (not his real name) had disappeared in the summer of 1994. About six months later, his boyfriend admitted to Lexington police detectives that he had killed Bill and hidden his body in the woods near Whitley City, another small town in southeastern Kentucky. State police troopers, sheriff's deputies, and Lexington city detectives searched diligently for Conley for more than a year, until finally, late one December afternoon in 1995, I got a call from the McCreary County Sheriff's Department. Conley's body was long gone, of course. But they thought they'd found his skull.

It was just before dark that I met Deputy David Morrow at the Blue Heron Café on Highway 27S. I followed his cruiser up a winding gravel road, where we stopped beside a pea-green 4x4 Jeep Cherokee belonging to the U.S. Forest Service. Through bitter experience, I'd learned to keep all of my key field gear in a sturdy backpack-in Kentucky's rough rural terrain, it's a rare occasion when I can actually drive my full-size van right up to a crime scene-so it didn't take long to transfer my camera, pack, and shovel into the Jeep.

A few minutes later, we had driven up the rocky, washed-out side road to a place where two trees had been marked with fluorescent orange spray paint, showing where one of the deputies had already blazed a path to the scene. I'd earned the nickname “Boondock Bone Doc” from all the hours I'd logged at crime scenes just like this one, on the side of a mountain or way out in the woods, searching for skeletal remains. And no matter where I went, no matter how isolated the scene, the first thing I always saw was a cluster of cops standing around smoking cigarettes, waiting patiently for my arrival.

“I hope this really is Conley's skull,” I said under my breath to the deputy, and he nodded. During the past year, people searching for this very victim had located the skeletal remains of three other people in the woods within a thirty-mile radius of where we were right now. I couldn't help being a little skeptical.

“So how do you know it's his?” I went on.

David was just now getting his long legs untangled from the Jeep's backseat. He handed me my pack and smiled. “You see that scraggly lookin' guy by that tree?”

I nodded.

“He's says he's the one who killed him.”

“You're kidding!”

“Yeah, he's been telling every cop who would listen that he killed his lover in Lexington, then brought the body down here to hide it. Unfortunately, he hid it so well that even he couldn't find it again, even after he decided to confess.”

“Why did he confess?” I asked. “If the victim was so well hidden, no one would ever have been the wiser.”

David laughed and leaned down to whisper in my ear. “The guy has AIDS now, and I guess he figured if he could get arrested and put in jail, then at least he'd have medical care for the rest of his life.”

“Oh, great. And here I thought maybe he just felt guilty and wanted to do the right thing.”

“Well, he did do the right thing, for whatever reason. We just need the body before we can put him away. Luckily, the detective in Lexington finally had him talk to one of the Forest Service guys who knows this area, and the killer's description of the terrain gave him just enough clues that he was able to find this skull. There's a side story to this too, that will make your hair stand on end-”

McCreary County Coroner Milford Creekmore joined us, interrupting the “side story” as he and his team piled out of their ancient ambulance, deluging us with friendly greetings. I stared at his old vehicle, hardly able to believe he'd gotten up into this rough terrain, but I should have known that where Milford was concerned, ordinary rules don't apply. We'd already worked together on a few cases-he's a great guy and, until his defeat in a close election a few years ago, he was one of Kentucky 's most colorful coroners. Mountain born and bred, Milford was about as round as he was tall, and by age forty he'd lost all but a few of his natural teeth. He scrounged the junkyard for cheap vehicles and then equipped them with the most outlandish, jury-rigged set of lights and sirens you could imagine. However, tonight he had managed to get his vehicle up that terrible road, urging it on like a recalcitrant mule, and when he and his clan piled out I knew that not one of them would hang back from the work ahead, not Milford-or his two sons-or his ex-wife-or his daughter, who had brought along her baby. They all wanted to see the skull and help with the investigation, but Milford made it clear that he and no one else was going to be my right-hand man.

Walking single file through a steady cold drizzle, we all headed for the site, which was about twenty feet down the side of the embankment away from the road. A bright-orange surveyor's plastic flag marked the spot, and I was surprised that I couldn't see the skull-until Gus Skinner, the Forest Service law enforcement investigator, got down on his knees and folded back some droopy clumps of grass to reveal something resembling a groundhog's burrow. There, about two feet below the surface, I could see the back of a human skull, resting face down in a pool of crystal-clear water.

To reach into the hole-the origin of a little artesian spring-I'd have to lie down flat on my belly and stick one arm and shoulder into the burrow, with my cheek rubbing into the very soil where the victim's body had probably decomposed. Maybe I was getting used to human decay-but I wasn't yet ready to do that.

As soon as he saw the problem, Milford voluntarily removed his ample raincoat and laid it on the ground with a flourish that would have made Sir Walter Raleigh proud. I lay down on it, took a few pictures, and finally reached down to grab the skull. I sat up as quickly as I could, turning the skull over in my hands to do a brief analysis in the flashing light of the detectives' cameras.

First off, I could tell this skull had belonged to an adult White male-the same biological profile as the putative victim. I could see the empty tooth sockets with their sharply defined edges-clear signs that the man's teeth had fallen out after he died. I suspected that the teeth were still down there in the hole. I could also see one tooth socket that was already filling in with bone as the edges began to smooth over. That tooth had been lost well before death, so long ago, in fact, that it had begun to heal. The dental information would come in handy when we had to make our ID.

I didn't see any fresh fractures in the skull that would have indicated any sort of head injuries. That, too, was useful, because it told us that we wouldn't have to look for a bullet or a baseball bat.

I put the skull into my evidence bag for future reference and turned my attention to the teeth and some small neck bones I could now see at the bottom of the spring. Even when I lay on Milford 's raincoat, they remained just out of my reach. The guys dug out a little around the hole's edge, which seemed like a good idea until I actually put my head, shoulders, and both arms into the enlarged hole. Then, thanks to Milford 's plastic coat, I started to slide in, headfirst. Chivalry is not dead in Kentucky, though, and at least three pairs of hands instantly grabbed hold of my belt, ankles, and parts in between, saving me from a chilly, stinky shampoo.

With that we decided to quit for the night and start fresh the next morning. Milford made arrangements for all of us to stay at a little local motel and, after we checked in, we all slipped over to the café next door. By “all,” I include the confessed murderer. In fact, sitting across from him, munching on my hamburger and talking about the weather, I lost sight of the fact that I was in the middle of a homicide investigation until he stood up, ostensibly to go to the bathroom. Three men with guns and badges were on their feet before he ever cleared his chair. He wasn't fazed by this, but I certainly was. When they finally escorted him to the men's room, the rest of us laughed quietly to break the tension. Then Deputy David Morrow leaned across the table and asked me if I wanted to hear the story he'd started to tell me out there in the woods. Of course, I said yes.

“I'm not sure you noticed, but halfway down that mountain road there was a divot in the limestone cliff, and a piece of pipe was sticking out,” he began.

“Yeah, I saw that. It looked like some sort of well, or maybe a spring.”

“That's exactly what it is, Doc, the outlet of a spring where most of the locals get their drinking water.” In the next seat, Skinner, the weather-worn U.S. Forest Service investigator, nodded as he, too, listened intently.

“That spring is a dandy, too,” chimed in Milford 's son Ethelbert. “In fact, I stopped on my way down and filled me up a couple of jugs.”

The deputy and Skinner exchanged glances. David set down his cup of coffee and closed his eyes. Skinner took over.

“Son, do you remember last spring when I placed a Forest Service warning sign on that spring?”

“Sure do. And do you know, the whole county was laughing at you for doing it? We've been getting our water from that spring ever since Daddy's daddy can remember. Everybody knows that it tastes funny every once in a while when the weather changes, but no harm has ever come of it. No gov'ment sign can keep the folks from this county from doin' what they've always done. And that's why that sign saying the water ain't fit to drink came down almost as soon as it went up.”

“Well, Ethelbert, they shouldn't have done that,” Skinner said patiently. “And you might want to go empty your jugs. Tonight the doc there almost fell into the source of that spring. And the guy she was trying to lift out of the water had a full-blown case of AIDS when the killer dumped his body there.”

Everybody at the table froze, and we “outsiders” turned to look at the Creekmores sitting at one end of the long table. As one, they pushed back their chairs and left the café. It's hard to say what happened that night, but rumor has it that the phone lines in McCreary County were jammed for hours.

The next morning, though, they were all back at the site, ready to go to work. Nobody mentioned the fouled drinking water again, but when Milford, Jr., one of the hardest workers in the bunch, was helping me scour the sand and gravel from the little stream, a frown was fixed across his face and he never uttered a word.

We searched for bones until the middle of the afternoon and we were able to find about half of what Conley had started with. The forest carnivores-coyotes, foxes, raccoons, and opossums-had done their best to scatter individual bones as they dragged them away from the rotting carcass to feast on the flesh and gnaw for the marrow. Then Mother Nature camouflaged what was left. Leaf-fall had blanketed the forest floor, and the bones had bleached and discolored until they matched the deep gray-brown of the twigs and leaves that covered them.

Those bones' size and shape make some of them difficult to locate, and even when they are located, it's important not to pick them up right away. Earlier, I had handed out handfuls of brightly colored surveyor's flags to all of my helpers, instructing them to leave each bone where they found it. “Just stick a flag in the ground and call me,” I'd urged. Sometimes, if you stand back and see the location of several bones at once, you can establish a pattern to the scatter. In many cases, heavy rains rushing down a slope or an animal following some instinctive route will scatter the bones in a specific direction that might lead you to a cache of smaller, lighter bones, the ones that are usually hardest to find.

That's exactly what had happened here, and after about fifteen flags dotted the forest floor, I could see that they formed a kind of pie-slice shape, with the apex right near the spot where we'd found the skull. From there, the flags sort of fanned out, with one edge of the triangle along the creek and the other at the base of the hill. We'd found one rib bone about sixty feet from the spring outlet, which we used to mark the third side of the triangle. For now, this triangle was the outer limit of our search as we walked shoulder to shoulder in one long line, back and forth across this wedge of land, stirring the leaves with our feet and sticking marker flags into the ground every time we found a bone.

The detectives took lots of pictures and then sketched the overall scene to document the bones' distribution. When we were finally ready to collect the bones, Milford, David, and I walked through the woods together. I picked up each bone, looked at it quickly, and told David how to enter it in the log book: #1 = right scapula, #2 = left humerus, and so on. Milford then popped each bone into a bag numbered according to the log.

Things had been going smoothly when I picked up #63, a left femur. When I looked at it, however, I was startled. What in the world had happened to the distal end of this bone, down by the knee? It looked as though it had been broken off, crisscrossed with deep gashes that left long bony splinters hanging off the end where the knee joint should have been. I knew these woods were full of black bears and coydogs-large mongrel farm dogs that had bred with coyotes-and I knew that these scavengers often chewed human bones down to the core. But this bone looked as though something else had happened to it.

I didn't want to slow down our search, so I just asked David to make a note in the log and told Milford to set this bone aside for a closer look. Then, about ten feet farther on, I picked up the right femur and the mystery began to clear up. This bone had identical striations and the end with the knee joint was also missing. I decided not to voice the suspicion that was beginning to form-not until we collected the rest of the evidence.

By now, the afternoon was turning to evening, and we had reached the point of diminishing returns. The rest of the team had searched an area about fifty yards beyond our triangle, and a local search and rescue team had brought in some of their cadaver dogs. All of these searchers now agreed that they'd done all they could and we decided to call it quits. We had enough bones and teeth to identify the victim, and we'd certainly recovered a great deal of Conley's skeleton.

I was no longer surprised, though, that we hadn't recovered any bones from Conley's feet or lower legs. Sitting down in the open rear hatch of the Jeep, I pulled out the two femurs, gently brushed off the dirt and leaf litter, and held them side by side. I could now be sure that the gashes and grooves were deliberate and man-made. Conley's legs had been cut off.

This was my first case of human butchering, and when I gathered my colleagues to explain my findings, they were as shocked and confused as I was. Of course, the murderer had already confessed, but none of us was comfortable with the notion that there was another crime scene out there somewhere-the place where someone had cut Conley's legs off at or around the time of death.

The Lexington detectives had already returned to their home turf, taking the confessed killer with them. David got through to them on his radio to see if they could squeeze any more information from the suspect before he “lawyered up.” But our luck had run out. The confessed killer wasn't talking anymore, now that he was assured a lifelong berth in the penitentiary, and we were left to wonder what had happened. Maybe the body wouldn't fit into the trunk of his car once rigor mortis set in? Maybe he'd wanted to keep a trophy? Maybe he'd gotten hungry and decided to follow in the footsteps of Jeffrey Dahmer?

It's a safe bet that no one will ever know, but here's where I decided to call on Nancy, who I thought could at least help me identify the weapon that had been used to make the cuts. Nancy had studied the macabre practice of human butchering and the evidence this practice left on bones-just the kind of science that I needed to wrap up this case.

When Nancy had a chance to examine the bones, she confirmed that the preliminary cuts on Bill's legs had been made with a thick, smooth-bladed knife, while the final amputations had been performed with hacking blows from an axe-like tool. She explained that a saw or a knife often leaves its “signature” on the bone, so that a hacksaw, for instance, makes fine irregular lines across the cut end of a bone, whereas a large table saw cuts cleanly in a single direction until the bone is severed. A chainsaw rips and chews through the bone in an instant, leaving gouges and chips in its wake, while a serrated knife leaves a pattern of dips and points-not to be confused with the straight, smooth cut mark often left by a butcher knife or a meat cleaver. The work done with cut marks by Nancy and my fellow forensic anthropologists-Steve Symes of Pennsylvania and the late William Maples of Florida-has helped to put numerous suspects behind bars.

I've had occasion to use cut-mark evidence in several other Kentucky cases, in sometimes surprising ways. One of the things that haunts investigators is knowing that a person can die violently-stabbed, shot, poisoned-without a single mark being left on the bone. And when the flesh has decomposed or been burned away, the bones are all you've got left.

Luckily, bones enable you to roughly determine the time a wound was inflicted, and fairly easily, too, because the nature of bone changes so radically after the body dies. When a person is alive or very recently dead, his or her bones resemble green wood. If you stick a knife into what we call a “green bone,” you can pry up a little sliver, because the bone-living tissue-is still pliable. If you try to make the same cut days or weeks after death, the bone is more like firewood-dead and dried-out wood-and it's not going to have that flexibility. That's why the cut marks made at or around the time of death look completely different from those made after death-if you know what to look for. So when Nancy and I reviewed the evidence in the case of Bill Conley, we concluded that the bone had been sliced “perimortem”-either at the time of death, immediately before, or fairly soon thereafter. Although we couldn't tell exactly why the amputation had happened, at least Nancy had identified the butchering tools.

From a death investigator's point of view, there are two types of fires: the kind that kill people, and the kind that somebody sets to disguise a homicide. Kentucky has far more than its share of the latter, and nobody really knows why. Is it that investigators in other states just aren't as suspicious about fire-related deaths as we are? Or does the criminal element in Kentucky really not know that even the most all-consuming fire inevitably leaves behind some human bones?

Of course, I'm glad they don't know. I'm kind of reluctant to tell them. But for the record, here it is: If you ever plan to incinerate a person, don't count on the body being completely destroyed. Trying to burn a human body-which after all is about 80 percent water-is like trying to burn a huge, sopping sponge. The fluid-filled organs, muscles, and bones can often withstand the fiercest of flames.

Ironically, one of my first major cases of homicide disguised by fire also happened in Pulaski County, where it was initially discovered by my old friend Sheriff Sam Catron. By the time this case broke in 1995, Sam, like so many law enforcement officers in Kentucky, had learned to keep my personal phone numbers in his pocket. My colleagues across the state know I'm available to them at any time of the day or night, so I wasn't surprised to get Sam's call at five o'clock one April Sunday afternoon.

“So here's the story,” Sam said wearily after we'd exchanged the usual pleasantries. “A small wood-frame farmhouse in the northeastern corner of the county burned to the ground earlier this afternoon. The fire department found two charred bodies in the living room. We found one more in one of the bedrooms.”

Sam and I both knew that this case wasn't necessarily a homicide. In Kentucky, it's not that unusual for remote dwellings to burn to the ground with sleeping or incapacitated occupants inside. Lots of mountain folks rely on wood-burning stoves and kerosene heaters for heat, and they sometimes use coal-oil lamps or even candles for light. The rural volunteer fire departments do their best, but sometimes they're not even aware of the fire until it's too late to help. In this case, a distant neighbor just happened to see the blaze and call it in. But the ramshackle old house was pretty much rubble by the time the firefighters got there.

Generally, the coroner, local law enforcement officers, and an arson specialist examine a fire scene. If the fire appears to be truly accidental, the bodies are simply recovered and brought to the M.E.'s office for autopsy and positive ID.

So what had made Sam and the coroner suspicious in this case? For one thing, the fire had occurred in the middle of a mild day in April. Not much chance that anyone was using a heater. Then there was the time of day. How likely was it that three able-bodied people were sleeping so soundly during daylight hours that they couldn't make their way out of this small one-story house, especially since there were plenty of doors and windows? The third clue, and the one most significant to trained fire-death investigators, was the fact that the bodies themselves were in abnormal positions.

Of course, probably no charred fire victim can be said to have a “normal” position, but there are certain things you look for when investigating a fire death. If a person dies from smoke inhalation-the usual cause of death in a fire-carbon monoxide builds up in the blood, causing a rapid loss of consciousness. Even after the person has blacked out, though, his or her body continues to react. The windpipe, or trachea, sucks in soot and smoke, and the organs and muscles turn a bright cherry red as carbon monoxide replaces oxygen in the blood. Last-minute chemical reactions in the muscles of the victim cause him or her to contort into what we call the “pugilistic” position-arms bent at the elbows; wrists and forearms drawn in toward the shoulders; hands balled into fists, as if the person were engaged in a boxing match. The legs, too, often flex slightly at the hips and the knees, so that the victim looks to be sitting in some imaginary chair.

However, none of the bodies in the Pulaski County farmhouse were in that position, Sam told me, meaning that there had been no physiological muscle reactions to the fire. And since Sam could actually see one victim's internal organs through rents in the abdominal wall, he'd noticed that there was no sign of the cherry-red discoloration that would have been there if the victim had died while inhaling smoke.

When I arrived at the scene, Sam walked me through the remnants of the little house and pointed out the other reasons he was suspicious. Something about this case had gotten to him: There was a catch in his normally soft voice, lending an air of uncharacteristic sadness to a man I had come to know as cheerful and completely professional even at a crime scene. Then, as we tiptoed through the rubble, Sam suddenly bent down beside a bright-yellow marker flag, and I saw what had affected this career lawman so profoundly. This victim was tiny-by my estimation, a child no older than two or three.

“There's another little one over here, Doc,” Sam said as he took my hand and helped me negotiate over a still-smoking pile of rubble topped off with a porcelain sink. This second victim was a little bigger, but from head to toe, he-or she-was only about four feet long.

“I know you don't like us to go tromping around through a fire when we've got potential murder victims,” Sam went on. “So once the coroner and I confirmed that we had a suspicious situation, I had everybody just back off until you got here. But the biggest body is over there.” He pointed with his chin while lifting a burned beam out of our way. “Firefighters found that one right off-the others were so little that it took a while. But nothing's been disturbed. Even the firefighters stopped spraying heavy water once they realized there were bodies in here, just a fine mist to keep the fire down.”

Sam stopped talking abruptly as though he was trying to get control of his voice, and I had to stifle an impulse to put a comforting hand on his arm. Instead, keeping my own voice casual, I said, “Okay, Sam, that's good. Why don't you keep filling me in while I'm getting my stuff together?”

Sam followed me out to my van, talking more naturally now. “The neighbor says that a woman, Shirley Bowles, lived here with her two kids, Amy and Brian. Seems she got married to man she hardly knew back about a month ago, 'cause she thought he could help her out with the kids. That man, McKinney, was around when they were trying to put out the fire, but he left when the firemen started asking the whereabouts of Shirley and the little ones. He came back for a while, but then when they started finding bodies, he disappeared for good.”

I cast a furtive glance into the woods, which were turning dark with the setting sun. “Where is he now?”

Sam saw what I was thinking and, suddenly, he grinned. “I don't know, Doc, but I've got men out looking for him. I've also got sharpshooters posted around this place, just in case he tries something funny. You know I always cover your back.”

He was right there. Once, his deputies had literally shielded my body with their own when a distraught father had sneaked up to the periphery of our crime scene with a rifle, threatening to shoot me and the coroner during our court-ordered exhumation of his two children.

I grinned back. “Okay, Sam. How about you watch out for me, and I'll try to help us nail whoever did this?”

I climbed into the one-piece navy jumpsuit I wear at most crime scenes, along with the matching cap that proudly announced “State Medical Examiner.” After I pulled on my fireproof boots, I strapped heavy pads across the front of my knees so I could crawl over anything in my path, pulled on a pair of thin leather gloves, and reached for a stack of the plastic snap-lid boxes I keep in my van for collecting fire-scene evidence.

Back in the house, I knelt beside the biggest victim and lifted off the large pieces of burned wood that had half-buried the body. Then I gently brushed away the loose debris from what used to be the victim's face with a large, soft paintbrush about four inches wide, careful not to disturb any bone fragments that might be in the vicinity. Like any housewife, I brushed the ashes into an ordinary dustpan, and then-contrary to most standard housekeeping manuals-slid them carefully into a paper bag to look at later under a magnifying lens.

The victim's face had all burned away, but I could see by her bones that she was a female. What remained of her forehead was smooth and rounded, or “bossed,” while the bone above her eye sockets was smooth, without the heavy brow ridge that most men have. Her bones also told me that she was an adult: Her skull bones and their connecting growth plates, or suture lines, showed signs of complete closure, as opposed to a child's partially open skull. And this woman's mouth was clearly full of permanent teeth. A large section of her skull was missing, but I could see the broken fragments-some still attached to her body, others scattered among the debris. Rearing back on my haunches, I tried to keep my hands and body out of the way as I asked the detective standing beside me to take several photos.

When I'm working a crime scene-especially a fire scene, where all the evidence is so fragile-I continually have to remind myself and everyone else to slow down. After all, the victims are already dead. They're not going to get any deader. Despite the natural human reaction to respect the dead by removing and cleaning up their bodies as soon as possible, we actually show them more respect by leaving them where they are and documenting the evidence that can help us discover how they died. Once you've moved a piece of evidence at a crime scene, that's it. You can never put it back.

To make sure we all take proper care, I've developed my own protocol for collecting evidence from a suspicious fire-death scene, a procedure that has proven to be so successful that coroners across the Commonwealth have adopted it as the standard for all fire deaths. Better safe than sorry and, if an apparent accident turns out to be murder, this procedure will protect what might turn out to be crucial evidence.

So now, having exposed the body and noted its position and condition, I continued to follow my own protocol. First stop: the head, where I tried to pick up fragments that might have separated from the rest of the skull. Several of these quarter-sized broken pieces had already fallen into the pile of burned debris that surrounded the victim's head and shoulders. Other pieces teetered precariously on the rounded surface of the remaining skull, so before they could fall, I gently coaxed them free and stored them in one of the snap-lid boxes that were also part of my protocol. Before I started using these boxes, fragments were simply placed in the body bag, where they were often ground into powder from their contact with other bones and the body itself during the long, bumpy journey from the crime scene to the morgue. I quickly learned not to do that, because I know these loose fragments are too precious to lose: By putting them back together at the autopsy, I often figure out exactly how the person died. The boxes are a great protector, and I'm happy their use has spread across the state.

Meanwhile, the woman's partially destroyed head lay before me, so I picked up a small piece of skull bone from the ashes and matched its jagged edges to the part of the skull still clinging to her brain. These two bone fragments had once formed a single bone-but the piece I held in my hand was a pale, toasty brown, while the piece attached to her brain was charred and blackened by the fire. The bone had been cleanly fractured and was easy to rematch-but why were the two fragments such different colors? The answer to that question lay in the science of differential burning.

Differential burning is most often associated with fatal wounds to the skull, that prime target of murderers. Usually, when you're dealing with a fire, you're trying to answer one key question: Did the intense heat of the fire break this skull apart, or was the skull shot, hit, or crushed before the fire began?

If you know how to read the skull fragments, they can usually tell you. When an intact skull cracks open in a fire, all the pieces show the same kind of burning, as if a painted vase had simply cracked. If the skull was fractured before it burned, however, each fragment burns in a slightly different way. When you reconstruct that kind of skull, it looks as though somebody broke a vase, painted a few random pieces, and then put it back together.

That sort of differential burning was here in my hands, and since we all knew something wasn't quite right with this scene, I didn't want to take any chances on losing what might be a crucial piece of evidence. So I got Alan Stringer's brother, Larry, the deputy coroner, to help me with the next step. Larry gently lifted the victim's rigid shoulders, bringing the head up out of the burned debris as I unfolded a medium-sized white trash bag, the kind that has a built-in drawstring at one end, and slipped it over her head. Now if anything else broke off, it would be preserved intact inside the bag. And if any associated evidence should get dislodged during transport-a tooth, an earring, maybe even the bullet or bullet fragments I was seeking-that would be safely contained as well.

With the victim's head tightly wrapped in plastic, I picked up the pieces of bone at the distal, or far, ends of her arms and legs. This was harder than it sounds. Imagine a fireplace in which all the wood has burned away to ash and clinkers. Now you have to go through those clinkers-all of them the same color; each with its own odd, distorted shape-and distinguish between the ones that used to be bone and the ones that used to be wood. They all look pretty much the same, so your only clue is a variation in shape-and, of course, each piece's relationship to the torso.

Working as slowly and carefully as I could and documenting each part of the process, I recovered the bones of each extremity-left arm and hand, left leg and foot, then the right arm, the right leg, putting each extremity into its own carefully labeled plastic box. I took special care with the victim's right arm, where I could see some differences in color in the bone fragments, which again suggested differential burning. My guess was that her arm, too, had been broken into pieces before it burned off in the fire.

With all the small pieces recovered, we were finally ready to bag the torso. I'd learned the hard way to save that for last, having seen many cases in which grabbing the torso first disrupted forever the fragile, fire-ravaged bones of the extremities.

Now the body was gone-but we still weren't through with this victim's associated evidence. Because of the numerous fractures, I strongly suspected that this woman had sustained at least one gunshot wound to the head and one to the arm, so we scooped up the charred and blackened debris that had lain under the victim, hoping it contained a bullet.

Whenever a person is shot, you hope that the bullet is still inside the body. When the body is burned, though, a bullet might fall through the charred flesh into the surrounding debris. I can't stand the thought of losing a bullet, so when I work a potential homicide scene, I make sure to shovel up all of the debris, load it into bags, boxes, or buckets, and take it back with me to the lab. There an x-ray will point me to any bullets or parts thereof. In this case, we'd bagged up the body and the debris-but what if a bullet had passed all the way through the body and landed elsewhere in the mess? Sam and I were taking no chances: The house would remain a protected crime scene until after the autopsies. If I had to come back and put every scrap of wood and ash through a fine archaeological sifter, I was fully prepared to do so.

By the time I finished the recovery and field analysis of the children, I could see they'd most likely suffered the same fate as their mother. As I shared my suspicions with the rest of the team, our determination grew. We were all more than willing to do whatever it took to make sure someone didn't get away with murder. Not this time.

By now, I'd been on the job long enough to realize that most investigators-myself included-tend to divide cases into two categories. There are the ordinary murders, the ones you want to solve but have to accept that you might not. And-even though you always remain impartial with the evidence-there are some cases that really get to you, the ones you know will trouble your sleep for months to come if you don't put the killer behind bars. This was one of those cases. A young woman and two innocent children had apparently been gunned down and then incinerated-and not one seasoned professional at that scene was going to rest until we'd found out who'd done it.

It was after midnight when I got home that night, and the odor of burned flesh, smoke, and blood had seeped into my nose, my skin, and even my hair. I showered for at least thirty minutes, trying to remove the scent of death, until I finally realized the taint was no longer on my body but had burned into my brain. Those weeks in Texas, the bodies of burned children, the odors of singed hair and charred flesh, engulfed me in a flashback that I couldn't repress. I crawled into bed and cried myself to sleep-something I hadn't done since Waco. Luckily, sleep worked its healing magic and I awoke the next morning ready to face a new day.

Less than a week later, Gary Casper McKinney, husband and stepfather of the victims, was arrested, and in 1998 he was on trial, facing three charges of capital murder and multiple other charges, including tampering with physical evidence, arson, and abuse of a corpse. The courtroom testimony mesmerized Pulaski County for more than a week, drawing spectators who filled the churchlike pews, curious to hear what had really happened there on Poplar Bluff Road on that quiet Sunday afternoon. The crowd was divided, somewhat like a rural wedding service, with friends and family of the victims on one side of the room and McKinney 's kin on the other.

The sheriff, his deputies, and the arson and ballistics experts testified one by one. Then it was my turn. We each presented evidence that was pertinent to the case, even playing a videotape of the crime scene that showed men removing the charred bodies from the burned-out structure. When Drs. Hunsaker and Coyne, the two forensic pathologists, gave their testimony, the defendant's fate was sealed. The vivid description of mother Shirley Bowles's death from multiple gunshot wounds was gripping enough, but no one even seemed to breathe as Dr. John Hunsaker revealed that a gun had pumped three bullets directly into the top of eleven-year-old Brian's head. Moments later a gasp echoed throughout the courtroom when Dr. Carolyn Coyne revealed that three-year-old Amy had died instantly after the trigger was pulled on a gun that had been thrust into her mouth.

The day I testified, Sam was waiting for me outside the courtroom. He came up to me, extending his right hand for a handshake and putting his other hand on my shoulder. We stood there looking at each other for the longest time, and I could see the tears in his eyes. “Thanks, Doc,” he said finally, and squeezed my hand one last time before he walked away.

After eight days of testimony and only five hours of deliberation, the jury found McKinney guilty of all three murders and he was sentenced to death. It was the first triple death sentence that anyone could remember in the history of the Pulaski County Circuit Court.

The Pulaski murder was the last one I ever cried over-until my friend Sam himself was assassinated in April 2002. Sam's life was ended abruptly by a sniper's bullet as he was leaving a rally and fish fry held during his campaign for a fifth term as sheriff.

Kenneth White, one of the biggest drug dealers and bootleggers in the county, thought that if Sam was out of the way, a more pliable sheriff might be elected, someone who would look the other way at the criminal activity in Pulaski County. White managed to get one of his henchmen, a former sheriff's deputy, named Jeff Morris, on the ballot, but it soon became clear that no one could beat Sam Catron in a fair election. So White and Morris decided to take more desperate measures. Danny Shelley, a local addict, seemed to be the perfect pawn in their plan, so they convinced him that Sam would kill him if he didn't kill Sam first. On that fateful night, Shelley pulled the trigger from a wooded hilltop overlooking the site of the fish fry and then sped off on White's motorcycle. Men in pickup trucks took off after him, and after a high-speed chase through the mountains, Shelley crashed. The impromptu posse pinned him down until he could be handcuffed and arrested by Sam's deputies.

Shelley almost immediately told authorities all about the scheme, then pled guilty before his case could go to trial. Eventually Morris also pled guilty, but White decided to take his chances before a jury. After more than a week of testimony, that jury took less than an hour to convict and sentence White to life in prison with no possibility of parole.

Sam was a beloved figure throughout the state and was nationally known for his dedication, honesty, and skill. The brutality-and the stupidity-of his assassination sent shock waves through the nation and the world, with his death receiving coverage from as far away as England, Poland, and Russia. More than two thousand mourners turned out for his funeral, and the Kentucky state legislature adjourned for a full day in his honor.

Whenever I think of Sam, I remember the day we were working a case we called “River Legs,” after a pair of decomposed legs that some canoeist had found floating down the Rockcastle River. Sam, Coroner Alan Stringer, and I went down to the river with several deputies to look for the rest of the remains.

The Rockcastle was a real wilderness river, deep down in a ravine, with high banks on each side. Sam and Alan flew reconnaissance, looking for other body parts in Sam's Huey helicopter, a craft he'd learned to fly so he could patrol his large rural county for signs of marijuana growing. I was out on a huge rock at the river's edge, flat on my belly, peering into the clear water with my binoculars-when suddenly I looked up in alarm. Sam and Alan had been flying low, of course, but now they were too low, the helicopter flying straight at me at what seemed an incredible rate. I later learned that Alan, who'd never been in a helicopter before, had shifted his weight unthinkingly, resting his thigh on the helicopter's collective, which controls its flight. With Alan's weight on the collective, Sam couldn't pull out of the deadly trajectory-and from what I could see, the helicopter was going to kill me for sure. But they flew so close in their open craft that I could look right into Sam's eyes-and then I wasn't frightened anymore. I just knew by the flicker in his stare that Sam would put that helicopter in the river before he let it hit me. And at the last possible instant-I mean, that thing was blowing river water into my eyes-Sam reached over and somehow pulled Alan off the collective. The craft whizzed right on by me. I was all right.

“Sorry to scare you, Doc,” Sam said when we all met up on solid ground later that day.

“I wasn't scared,” I answered, and we both knew I was telling the truth.

Losing Sam has given me a little bit of insight into what the relatives of homicide victims go through. I wasn't sure I could make it through his funeral. I wouldn't have missed it, though-and I'm so glad I went. My law enforcement colleagues welcomed me like a sister, and I knew once and for all that I was finally part of their community. That, I guess, was Sam's last gift to me.